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Comment by enos_feedler | Hacker News Reader

“ We persuade our minds that liking pictures and joining virtual groups gives us a sense of belonging. Connection with others”

Except in many cases its not persuasion. Joining groups actually does give us these things. My gf is part of “bay area moms” group and the amount of useful tips she gets out of participating in that is significant. Or “bay area hikers” for me. Also, if i want to sell something, I hire facebook to find a buyer for my old ipad or iphone.

Social media has caught on to the jobs framework. Jack Dorsey references it directly on Twitter earnings calls. He says we need to fill more jobs for more people. He constantly asks what can people hire twitter for?

I think to reduce social media to some of the crappy jobs it does serve artificially diminishes what it can be.

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I've yet to find a better tool for managing and communicating with local interest groups. For example, my local pinball group uses it to announce events, manage RSVPs, advertise machines for sale, and just chat about pinball. Meetup.com was a thing, but was more expensive and not quite as good of a product. This replaced a mailing list, but FB is frankly better at this, especially when it comes to managing events.

IME Facebook's interface is horrible and full of unnecessary cruft. Couldn't you just make a subreddit? Reddit is so much easier and cleaner IMO.

I don't believe it supports calendars/events for subreddits. You can "announce" and event, but it's not the same.

You're right. There are other calendar solutions, but obviously using multiple services is not a clean solution.

I'd still think about using a subreddit + Notion, but that's because I despise FB.

> I think to reduce social media to some of the crappy jobs it does serve artificially diminishes what it can be.

I agree completely with this. The article takes two bad parts of social media and assumes that those are the only uses for it. You've mentioned more. There's also keeping connected in a group context with family and friends that are scattered across the globe. I have an active family group in which my family shares pictures of nephews/nieces, vacation, and more - all stuff that helps keep us close when we can't see each other for long periods of time. I have an active friend group with my college roommates that does the same - when one of them discovered that his spouse was having an affair, we could all support him together.

I agree as well. Those two use-cases for using Facebook don't seem to apply to me. Here's what I use it for:

- Local community groups - I have a few groups localised for my suburb and surrounds, specifically "good karma" groups which are for people asking for/offering help. I'm also part of volunteer organisations and specific interest groups that post updates.

- Buying/selling, both on the marketplace and groups specific for certain things.

- Events. Useful for keeping up-to-date with event information, offering lifts to places and buying/selling tickets.

- Chat. Both with my friends and certain chat groups and also being able to contact people within my network quickly and easily.

I rarely if ever post anything on my profile, and I block the News Feed with plugins/extensions to avoid the infinite scroll.

Granted, a lot of these things could be replaced with other services out there. I'm aware of the privacy concerns and the UI/UX is getting worse over time. I hate Facebook, but the community and people I want to access all use it, so I don't really have a choice if I want to keep in touch.

To claim that people only use social media to seek validation or because your life is so mediocre that you need to consume the best moments of other people's lives, strikes me as a bit out-of-touch and arrogant.

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